Audience Management Platform
B2B, 0 to 1, eCommerce, Adtech
Launched an audience management platform to enhance audience targeting, leading to 62% account adoption rate and 68% attach rate of new campaigns that use a saved audience.
My Role
User Research
Product Designer
User Testing
Team
1 Product Designer (me)
1 Product Manager
5 Engineers
Duration
3 months
Problem
Limited function and repetitive work
Criteo Retail Media is an advertising platform that helps brands run digital campaigns at retailers’ sites. Audience targeting is a vital part of advertisers' campaigns. However, the current audience targeting function was limited and unscalable, and resulted in a lot of repetitive work for users.
Research
Current process and pain points
I interviewed our account managers to understand their pain points. Currently audience targeting was one step within the campaign setup workflow. The function was very limited, only supporting targeting audience based on their add-to-cart behavior. It had also resulted into repetitive work. Users often wanted to target the same audience for multiple campaigns, but they had to recreate the same audience for each of them.
Competitive research
I also conducted competitive research to understand how other platforms approached audience targeting. An interesting takeaway was the use of a gauge along with the audience size. This design not only told users the audience size, but also gave users a sense of whether the audience was broad or narrow.
Understanding data
PM mentioned that there were more retailer data we could leverage to enhance the audience targeting function. I worked with the Data team to understand what data were available, and how they could be translated into audience targeting. I learned that an audience was defined by four elements: retailer, shopping behavior, targeting parameters, and a lookback window.
Strategy
HMW let users create and manage audiences outside campaigns?
Based on research, I proposed a dedicated audience section in the platform. This new section would allow users to create and manage their audiences outside campaigns. Users would be able to get audiences ready before campaigns go live, and reuse the same audience across multiple campaigns.
Design
Wireframes
I started out listing all the inputs needed to create an audience. I then created wireframes to explore the information and interactions, and shared with account managers for alignment. From users' feedback, the creating audience form was not intuitive. I explored several versions to make it easier to understand and streamline interaction.
Layout improvement
Users also complained that tab layout was inconvenient, as they had to switch between tabs to see the selected products. Base on this feedback, I explored a two-column layout to improved visibility and reduce clicks.
Tree select
Displaying product categories posed a challenge. Retailers often have deep category paths, which can be difficult to display in a user-friendly way. I proposed a tree structure, and worked with engineers to confirm the feasibility. But I ran into another challenge: the category could be as deep as 6 or 7 levels, making it hard to show in limited space. After talking with the PM, we decided to show only the first 4 levels of the category, which covered most use cases. Any level deeper would be too specific and result in very a small audience size.
Dynamic audience size calculator
A dynamic audience size calculator was crucial for users to understand the scale of their audience in real time.
Apart from displaying the audience size, I also designed a gauge to visualize the audience as narrow, balanced or broad.
Audience table
After an audience is created, it will be stored in the account and displayed in the audience table. From engineers' feedback, the audiences would refresh regularly to include the latest data. To reflect this, I added a timestamp above the table to indicate data freshness. Since it takes some time for the system to match all the users after an audience is created, I added a ‘Populating’ status for the audience, so users would know when the audience was still being processed.
Final design
The final design is an independent audience management platform that enables users to manage audiences outside campaigns. With enhanced functions, users can target audiences in different stages of the conversion funnel, and view the audience size as they create an audience. After an audience is created, users can attach it to multiple campaigns, and store it in the account for future use.
Outcome
62%
account adoption rate
68%
Attach rate of new campaigns that use a saved audience